A terrible, terrible tragedy.

[Occhidiangela]

Well, I can honestly and safely say that my experience will not ever live up to your own, so I suppose I should take your judgment over my own personal beliefs.

Security work wasn't my primary, it was a task I had to work into the other work I did, so I am not as well grounded as a cop. Take my input with a grain of sea salt, as that is what coarses through my veins. :whistling:

I don't know what to think, Occhi. Like all of us, I wish there was something we could have done "different" to change things, to have prevented it or lessened it. I'm pragmatic and realistic enough to know that's not entirely possible, but screw-ups do happen, and I wonder whether or not it happened here.

I recommend this study a study by the FBI as a point of departure. Some good stuff.

Worth noting, from the introduction of the fifty page monograph:

The School Shooter Phenomenon and Threat Assessment
Adolescent violence in general, and homicides in particular, have decreased since l993, but
that hopeful trend has been somewhat obscured in the nationwide wave of concern over school
shootings of the type examined in NCAVC's study. This recent form of adolescent violence is in
fact quite rare. But the sudden, senseless deaths of teenagers and teachers in the middle of a
school day, for no comprehensible reason, is far more shocking and gets far more attention than
the less extreme acts of violence that happen in schools every week.

Under the intense spotlight of national media coverage, a tragedy such as the Columbine
High School shooting spreads horror, shock, and fear to every corner of the country. Educators,
mental health professionals, legislators, law enforcement officers, parents, students, and the rest of
the public all share a sense of frustration and helplessness and a compulsion to take some quick
action that can prevent similar incidents in the future.

Though understandable, this impulse can lead communities to forget the wisdom of H. L. Mencken's aphorism: "For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, neat, and wrong." In a knee-jerk reaction, communities may resort to inflexible, one-size-fits-all policies on preventing or reacting to violence.

As I said, I may just be colored by my small-town mind. I can only guess at how difficult it would be to lock down such a large location, so any opinions I have on the matter of what should have been done are going to be just that: opinions, based on nothing more than a whim, really. I freely concede that.

The "lock down" meme / sound byte seems to me tailored to prisons and single building schools or locations. That campus is hardly a good model.

Maybe everything was done right, and there was absolutely nothing that could have been done to lessen or prevent this disaster once the ball got rolling. I'm sure there were plenty of things that could have been done beforehand, in the months leading up to all this, but even that is asking a great deal.

What could have been done is that kid could have just shot himself if he was that depressed. What an arsehole, to take thirty people down with him in this lame Gotterdamerung. :( Maybe a little too much rap and emo framed his world image, or too much Wagner, too much Nietzsche, or a synergy of all that, encouraged a transition from iconoclasm to hatred to misanthropy. Maybe not. Maybe he reacted oddly to the anti depression meds he was on.

As always, your insight is an eye-opener.

The bigger eye opener to me was the news that he had been counselled for some odd behavior, but no one felt empowered to detoxify this guy more thoroughly.

There is a very fine line here, the whole 'Minority Report" conundrum, on how much authority anyone has to save someone else from his or her own inner demons. Having never been a loner, I have reached out to people who box themselves off, and find that I often have trouble reaching them, of establishing common ground. It may be that few people found the effort of trying to reach this guy worth their time, and at the same time, the current idea of "give people their own zone to be weird in" was a rational reason not to pry.

No one likes nosey neighbors, do they? I don't think most of us want to be busybodies.

Occhi